Dynamic V2I/V2V cooperative scheme for connectivity and throughput enhancement

Abstract

Automotive infotainment systems are expected to be first deployed on highways to service drivers travelling long distances, who are more likely to utilize the infotainment applications. In order to meet the stringent requirements of the infotainment systems, road side units (RSUs) are installed along the highway to facilitate a continuous vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) connectivity. Due to the long travelling distance and small coverage of the individual RSU, a more cost-effective solution would be to combine V2I with the vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications to maintain the continuous connectivity. In this paper, we propose a new dynamic cooperation scheme that employs a dynamic forwarder selection strategy to generate an adaptive multi-hop V2V path for connectivity maintenance and throughput enhancement at a vehicle located outside of the RSU’s coverage range. For the commonly assumed scenario that all vehicles travel in the same direction and at the same speed, we develop an analytical model and derive closed-formed expressions for the average out-of-range connection time, number of service resumptions and achieved throughput. The developed analytical model provides insights into the impacts of inter-RSU distance, vehicles’ assistance willingness and the target vehicle’s buffer size to the network performance. Simulation results with practical parameter settings show that our proposed scheme is effective in improving connectivity while offering a high throughput for the target vehicle. In particular, a high vehicle density, more assistance willingness by the forwarders and a large buffer size at the target vehicle are shown to be helpful in sparse RSU deployments.